Serious Leisure in the Home: Professional Quilters Negotiate Family Space

Although quilting has become more popular in the USA since its re‐emergence in 1976, with 15 per cent of households participating at the time of writing, quilting is still thought by many to be a frivolous, quaint or silly feminized activity. Those who quilt professionally, or for profit have difficulty legitimating their efforts as ‘real work’. Our focus is on one aspect of the quilting industry — professional quilters — and their negotiation of legitimacy for quilting work that is done in the home. We conduct secondary qualitative data analysis of 147 interviews of mostly women professional quilters from the Quilters' Save Our Stories Oral History Project. Professional quilters have more legitimacy and more claim to home‐based resources such as time and space than do amateur quilters but their work is still devalued as a gendered activity in the home. Despite achieving objective indicators of professional success (e.g., money, prizes and international recognition), professional quilters still have difficulty defending their home‐based employment activities and acquiring resources to carry it out.     

A pilot study of Latinos with multiple sclerosis: demographic, disease, mental health, and psychosocial characteristics

In this study the authors present results from a survey of 99 Latinos with multiple sclerosis (MS), including demographic, disease, and mental health characteristics. Four in 10 respondents reported depressive symptoms; half thought they had more worries than other people due to their MS; and about 29?% thought they needed mental health care in the past year. Whereas 76?% of respondents were highly satisfied with their access to MS-focused care, only 61% were highly satisfied with their access to mental health care. These findings highlight the role of mental health and social services in the comprehensive care needed by Latinos with MS.     

Women's perceived body image: relations with personal happiness

The present study examined the relationships between body image and happiness in adult women. One hundred and forty-four women, with an average age of 40 years, were surveyed. Within the sample, three age groups were established: college-aged women, middle-aged women, and older women. Each participant completed the Body Esteem Scale (Franzoi & Shields, 1984), the Eating Attitudes Test (Garner & Garfinkel, 1979), and the Life Satisfaction Index A (Neugaten, Havighurst, & Tobin, 1961). Results indicated that happiness significantly and positively correlated with the three components of body esteem: sexual attractiveness, weight concern, and physical condition. There were no significant differences among the types of body satisfaction expressed by women of different ages. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of recognizing body image as a major contributor to overall life happiness in women.     

Correspondence in Residents' and Staff Members' Assessments of the Quality of Life of Children in Residential Care Facilities

This paper employs Shye's (1979, 1985, 1989)Quality of Life (QOL) model to examine the QOLof 920 boys and girls in 46 Residential CareFacilities in Israel, from the perspective ofboth the residents and the staff. Specifically, it examines the degree ofcorrespondence in the residents' and staffs'assessments of the residents' QOL and theassociation between the degree ofcorrespondence and the quality of the facility. Findings showed that while residents and staffmade similar assessments in various areas ofthe residents' cultural and social QOL, theresidents rated their physical QOL higher andtheir psychological QOL lower than the staffdid. Findings also showed that while residentsand staff agreed on the residents' QOL in thepoorest facilities, they disagreed in theothers. In the better facilities, the staffrated the residents' QOL lower than theresidents' did; in the poorer facilities, theresidents rated their QOL lower than the staff. These findings raise concern about staffawareness of the psychological hardships anddistress of the juveniles in their care, aswell as about their ability under thesecircumstances to provide adequate psychologicalcare.     

The prediction of preference for unfamiliar urban places

Preferences for unfamiliar urban environments were studied as a function of urban categories, viewing time, and four predictor variables: complexity, coherence, identifiability, and mystery. A nonmetric factor analysis of the preference ratings for the longest viewing-time condition yielded five dimensions: Contemporary Life, Alley/Factory, Urban Nature, Unusual Architecture, and Older Buildings. The five categories differed significantly in preference, with Urban Nature by far the most preferred and Alley/Factory distinctly disliked. The combination of low coherence and high complexity characterizes the least liked Alley/Factory category, while the role of mystery in the urban setting is highlighted by the most preferred Urban Nature category. The results point to various ways in which the urban environment could be more responsive to people's preferences.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Grand Valley State Colleges Research Development Fund to Thomas Herzog and in part by the Urban Forestry Unit of the U.S. Forest Service's North Central Experimental Station in a cooperative research agreement with R. Kaplan and S. Kaplan.     

The Influence of Local Price and Availability on Parents’ Choice of Child Care

The striking variation in patterns of child care usage across states reflects differences in family characteristics, but may also reflect exogenous differences in local child care markets. Type of care selected will be influenced by the availability, cost, and accessibility of supply in the child care market as well as by family and child characteristics and cultural preferences. This study contributes to the growing literature on parental demand for child care by using a recent detailed data set from the state of Minnesota. We link household-level data on child care usage and family characteristics with county-level data on average provider rates and availability by type of care in order to estimate multinomial logit models analyzing the family, child, and market characteristics that predict type of care. Our analysis shows that using a relative or friend to care for a child is largely determined by availability, and choice of family care providers is most responsive to price for employed mothers. The types of care chosen by mothers who are not in the paid labor force differ substantially from the choices of employed mothers, and their use of center care is influenced by the prices of both center and family providers. Attitudes towards relative care are also shown to influence type of care chosen.     

Midwifery pre-registration education and mid-career workforce participation and experiences

Background

Midwives in Australia are educated through a range of routes providing flexible ways to become a midwife. Little is known about whether the route to registration impacts on mid-career experiences, in particular, whether the pathway (post-nursing pathway compared with ‘direct-entry’) makes any difference.

"Living well in later life": an overview of the National Service Framework for Older People in England

The National Service Framework (NSF) for Older People is a set of standards produced by the Department of Health in England in 2001 to overhaul the health and social service delivery systems over a 10-year period aimed at optimizing the care received by older adults. The NSF arose from broader social and health care reforms that likewise sought the establishment of performance assessment, augmented consumer sovereignty, and greater coherence across health and social services. The United States shares with England similar problems with care for its older adults, strategies for improvement, and obstacles to successful implementation of change.     

The Gambler’s Fallacy and the Hot Hand: Empirical Data from Casinos

Research on decision making under uncertainty demonstrates that intuitive ideas of randomness depart systematically from the laws of chance. Two such departures involving random sequences of events have been documented in the laboratory, the gambler’s fallacy and the hot hand. This study presents results from the field, using videotapes of patrons gambling in a casino, to examine the existence and extent of these biases in naturalistic settings. We find small but significant biases in our population, consistent with those observed in the lab.JEL Classification: C9 Experimental, C93 Field Experiments, D81 Decision Making under Risk and Uncertainty